1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a substrate measuring method, a computer-readable recording medium recording a program thereon, and a substrate measuring system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a photolithography process in manufacturing, for example, a semiconductor device, for example, a plurality of steps such as a resist coating step of applying a resist solution onto a wafer to form a resist film, an exposure step of exposing the resist film into a predetermined pattern, heating step of accelerating the chemical reaction in the resist film after exposure (post-exposure baking), and a developing step of developing the exposed resist film are performed in sequence, so that a predetermined resist pattern is formed on the wafer. The series of processing is performed in a coating and developing treatment system incorporating various kinds of processing and treatment units and wafer transfer units, in which, for example, a plurality of wafers for the same recipe are successively transferred and processed.
Incidentally, to grasp, for example, the processing tendency within the wafer of the series of processing, it is necessary to measure the processing state of the wafer such as the line width of the resist pattern after the wafer processing in the above-described coating and developing treatment system. The measurement of the wafer is performed by processing a test wafer before processing of a product wafer, for example, in the coating and developing treatment system and measuring the processing states at a plurality of measurement points on the test wafer, for example, by a measuring unit incorporated in the coating and developing treatment system (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2006-128572 and JP No. 2003-209093).
However, when the wafer processing state is measured using the test wafer as described above, it takes a long time to start processing of the product wafer. For this reason, it is considered to directly measure the processing state using the product wafer.
However, the product wafers are transferred in succession by a plurality of wafers for each lot in the coating and developing treatment system. Therefore, if a product wafer is measured at many points after the product wafer has been subjected to the last step, it takes a long time for the measurement, causing waiting time of other product wafers subsequent thereto. This causes congestion of the product wafers transferred in succession, resulting in decreased throughput of the wafer processing.